


Dreamscape Academy

by Karwin



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 22,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21678727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karwin/pseuds/Karwin
Summary: Welcome to Dreamscape Academy, the first and only school built and maintained within the Dreamscape. Be careful where you step, and do not stray too far.
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

My name is Colin, and I go to school in my sleep.

Alright, yeah, I’m sure that needs a little explanation. I lived through it and it took even me years to fully understand the situation I’ve been in. Heck, you could probably convince me that I still don’t.

It started shortly after I started Kindergarten. I had the usual slightly nerve-racking first day of school that most kids have despite there being literally nothing to cause a bad day.

I came home, told my parents about my first day because by then I’d of course gotten over it. Then, the next morning, I told them about my second first day while we were at the breakfast table.

They weren’t paying much attention at first. They just assumed I was repeating what I’d told them already, not noticing that I was describing a completely different school to them, one that had appeared to me when I went to sleep.

I just didn’t think it was at all strange back then. As a kindergartener, I just assumed that that was how school worked. You went during the day, then went again at night in your dreams, to the much, much bigger building that had light despite there not being any light bulbs, with tons of people from every age.

I remember thinking that it was conclusive proof that magic existed, and I guess it may well technically be. Even when I learned to understand what Dreamscape Academy was, I still had no reason to believe it wasn’t the work of magic, and no one inside or out had any explanation that could prove it wasn’t all just magic.

My parents took notice the first time I mentioned the school by name. They’d gotten in the habit of believing that I was playing pretend when I told them about my second school, and were glad to see me using my imagination; even if the only thing I was imaging was another school to visit.

“What’s it like when you go to Dreamscape Academy?” My mother asked, having decided to humor me today. I thought for a moment about how to describe it, then looked back to speak.

“It’s like.. When I close my eyes to sleep, I don’t. I wake up in bed, but not my bed, its a different bed.” I paused for a moment, then corrected myself, “Well I mean it is my bed, but not the bed I went to sleep in. It’s in a different room, with taller, blank walls, and after a few minutes, someone comes and knocks at my door.”

“Who is it?” My father asked, evidently growing a bit curious.

The man who would come to the door to get me had a very long name, one I probably couldn’t pronounce to this day.

At the time, I’d just called him Mr. Genius, but it had a few of the right syllables, and he worked at a school, so he had to have a smart name.

God I miss logic being that simple.

Anyway, the name Mr. Genius just stuck in my mind for him, becoming Mr. G when I was older. He was a nice, or at least pleasant man, tall and round, resembling a Santa Claus who’d decided red was out of fashion. It was him who first explained the rules to me when I told him I’d started telling my parents about Dreamscape Academy.

He sat me down before the daily (nightly?) classes, and told me that I shouldn’t be talking to my parents about Dreamscape Academy.

“It’s been fine so far,” He explained, “But if you keep telling people about it as you get older, they won’t believe you. They’ll call you a liar, or worse, they’ll call you mad. Take it from someone who learned a little too late.”

I remember wanting to ask him what he meant, but I just.. Felt like I shouldn’t. I nodded to him, and went to classes, and when morning came, I said nothing about it. Didn’t say anything the next day, or the next, even when I was asked about it.

My parents thought there was something wrong of course, I’d been so talkative about the school in my dreams that suddenly going silent made them think I was angry with them about something.

I convinced them I was fine, that I just wasn’t having the dream anymore, and time went on. I decided to tell them about other dreams instead just keep them from asking more questions.

They weren’t very good lies, but then again, I was a kid talking about dreams, so they didn’t really take much notice of it.

I should probably explain what the actual classes I was taking were, but the fact of the matter was the classes themselves weren’t the interesting part of the equation. They were just the normal classes one of my age would be taking, with the crucial difference of being inside my dreams.

A lot more got done at Dreamscape than regular school. Somehow the Dreamscape teachers could just capture my attention in a way the waking ones couldn’t. I rarely ever lost focus, always got my work done, and always felt good doing it.

Which is weird, because the massive size of the Dreamscape Academy rooms was much more distracting than a normal classroom. I guess there might have been some energy running through Dreamscape itself, making everything feel interesting.

As a result, normal classes became even more boring. I by no means started slipping in grades. In fact, because I’d more often than not just learned everything we were being taught the night before, or even a week before with how fast things moved in Dreamscape, I was practically an all A’s student, and my steadily growing contempt for normal school went unnoticed.

It wasn’t until the fourth grade that I found something interesting about waking school, and even then it was tied back to Dreamscape. I saw another boy while the class was out at recess.

He was short, with sandy blonde hair and, judging from the faceplant off the monkey bars he was now taking, no depth perception whatsoever.

Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him, other than laughing at the dive he’d just taken. But I realized that I recognized him. And when I went over to talk to him, he recognized me.

We sat right next to each other at Dreamscape Academy.

I was shocked. We’d never really spoken to each other or anything, save for him having borrowed a pencil once, but the idea of something from Dreamscape Academy being real, being tangible in the real world, it just wasn’t something I’d be remotely expecting.

And I could tell he knew it, and was as unexpecting of it as me, from his expression, like a shared thought. I helped him up, and we just sorta walked around the playground for a bit until he finally worked up the nerve to mention Dreamscape Academy. I could see the relief flood over him when I told him I knew, and that he wasn’t crazy.

“Well, good to have an answer for that one at least,” He said, “I’ve been wondering if I was just crazy for like a year now, and my parents have thought so since before then. I’m Sam by the way.”

“Colin,” I introduced myself, “Wait, you actually tried to keep telling your parents about Dreamscape? Isn’t that, like, the first thing Mr. G tells us not to do?” I questioned.

Sam blushed lightly in embarrassment, “Well, yeah, but they’re my parents, I couldn’t just not tell them something.” He said, blushing a bit deeper at the baffled look I gave him.

“Well you at least stopped telling them about when they started calling you crazy about it right?” I asked hopefully.

Sam shook his head, “I’ve been telling them any time they ask about it. They just.. Don’t ask anymore.”

I sighed at this, and told him what I’d been doing with my parents: say nothing about Dreamscape Academy, make up dreams to tell them about so they weren’t suspicious, and if something interesting does happen, talk about it like it was something that had happened at regular school. 

We would learn a lot at Dreamscape, but the info would all be useless if in the end we got locked up in the looney bin.

Sam reluctantly agreed. He didn’t like the idea of lying, so just decided to never mention Dreamscape to his parents. I figured that was just as good, and we continued to only speak of Dreamscape to each other.

We quickly became actual friends, though in waking school he was in a different class. We’d linger in Dreamscape after classes to talk about stuff, which would, occasionally, get us late for real school, as we’d not wake up until we stopped talking and got to our Dreamscape rooms.


	2. Chapter 2

I was confused at first when Sam first mentioned the flies. 

It was midway through fifth grade, and we were on our way back to our rooms after classes when we turned to me and asked, “Where do you think the flies come from?”

I looked at him like he’d just asked me why the color blue was blue. “I don’t know, they’re just flies, why?” I questioned back, unsure what could have led him to ask such a random thing.

“Well when we’re awake that makes sense,” Sam said, having been ready for me to not get what he was asking, “There’s animals and bugs and stuff in the real world. But how are there flies here to?” He asked, clarifying his question to me.

I paused for a moment, starting to get what he meant. I’d never actually thought about it, because why would I at first glance, but now that I was thinking about it, yeah; there were flies in Dreamscape. 

Currently there were a few crawling over the outside of a nearby window, which I guessed was what had sparked the question.

“I.. don’t know..” I said, suddenly just as curious about him, “Let’s ask Mr. G.” I said, figuring it wouldn’t be too bad to be five or so minutes late waking up from Dreamscape on a Friday.

We went down to the large wooden door at the end of the hallway, knocking on the professor’s door. The door opened and we were greeted by the large man, “Hello?” He greeted us politely.

We asked him about the flies, and he simply chuckled and waved us off, “Oh no need to worry yourselves with something so trivial as the bugs buzzing about the place. We do try to keep the place clean of course, but there are always pests here and there. 

“You should be keeping your minds focused on learning, and at the moment, on getting to sleep; or rather to waking up.” He said with a chuckle, shooing us back to our rooms so we could wake up.

This, as you can imagine, was a less than satisfying answer. We let it slide for the night, laying down and waking up, but from that point forward I would always notice the flies whenever they would move passed, and I noticed that the flies glowed. Every so often, the flies would let off a slight glow from their bodies, kinda like fireflies, despite just looking like normal flies.

My attention to the flies also led me to a bit of a tangential noticing of the actual school. Much like the flies, I’d never actually looked around and taken note of it, but now that I was, I realized that the geometry of Dreamscape Academy was slightly mad. 

It never seemed to have any point where it stopped or started. Every wall had a section of floor above or below it, every flood had stairs going up or down, leading somewhere else. It was like when you notice your own breathing or blinking, and can’t stop noticing it anymore.

This, however, Mr. G actually was willing to explain to me and Sam when we decided to ask about it, and actually seemed rather happy we’d asked; or perhaps just happy to talk about it.

“Dreamscape Academy is a wonderfully built structure isn’t it? Every since our forebears first constructed it after discovering the Dreamscape itself, it’s been growing and changing in order to fit in all the new students it’s been gaining. 

“As you can imagine, this leads to some slightly bizarre architecture. No matter how big it gets, it never stays the same for very long. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would look like from the outside, some kind of interpretive art piece from the gods themselves perhaps.” He said, chuckling at the thought.

“You’ve never seen the school from outside?” Sam questioned before I could, both of us more than a little confused by this statement. Actually, now that we were thinking about it, was there even an outside of the school at all?

Mr. G nodded, “I don’t suspect anyone has. It’s a wasteland outside of the building. Not much but grass, rocks, and dirt in any given direction for infinite space; and even that amount of landscape I suspect was just a result of collective imagination on the early explorers’ part. No one’s been outside since the original Dreamscape settlers first came and began setting up the academy.”

“Who were the people who first found the Dreamscape?” I asked. I hadn’t occurred to me that Dreamscape had to have been found by someone in the past, and the thought of someone stumbling by accident into another plane of reality was more than a little interesting.

Mr. G gave a chuckle at this, “Well, that’s a class or two above you in history I think, but I’m sure you’ll get to it before too long. You’ll be about to enter middle school yes? Classes will be getting much more interesting soon.”

I was late to normal school that day, because as you can imagine, it was a little difficult for me to relax my mind and fall asleep/wake back up after that. I supposed I could be patient, and not knowing wasn’t taking anything away from me, but it was still a sort of itch that couldn’t be scratched.

That is, until we met Jack.

Well, I guess what really started it was when we realized what the flies could really do, but the two events happened so close together they were basically the same thing.

About a month had passed since me and Sam had first noticed the flies. We’d gotten into the habit of trying to grab them, catch them in our hands whenever they were close. It wasn’t easy, but eventually I managed to catch one of them.

Classes had finished for the day, and we were on our way back to our rooms to wake up.

“Nice.” Sam said with a smile. I smiled as well as I opened my hands to release the fly, but the fly didn’t immediately leave my palms. Instead, the small light that it emitted grew, extending out like a flashlight from between my hands.

In the air above me, the light began to take shape, forming images like a projector; except it was projecting into the air. 

The images it showed depicted another student, a guy with short black hair and a cocky smile. He wasn’t inside the school though, he was outside one of the windows, walking along one of the many ledges that connected the building. 

He looked in both directions as though making sure he wasn’t being watched by anyone, then jumped off of the ledge, letting himself fall. 

The images cut out at that moment, the fly buzzing off from my hand. We were both frozen in confusion and shock. Sam looked up and down the hall, but there hadn’t been anyone around us to see it. 

Then we noticed that there was a window in the hall. 

We both scrambled to it, looking out of it as though we’d be able to find the guy we’d seen falling. And against all odds (well, not really, but it seemed like it was against the odds to us at the time), he was.

He wasn’t falling to his death though, just walking along the ledge. It’s hard to say, as I was in too much of a panic in the moment to really think about it, but I think that I thought the fly had somehow given us some kind of premonition of the future, and that we might be able to prevent it.

Cards on the table, I probably should have let a teacher know what was happening. But in a situation like that, and as a not quite middle schooler with logic and intellect of such, I kinda acted before I got to the thinking part of things.

I pulled and pried at the window until I had forced it open. Once it was, I scrambled out through it and onto the ledge, Sam trying to stop me at first, then following after me when he realized I wasn’t going to stop.

It was at about this point that I realized I had no idea what I was doing, and was just sort of awkwardly trying not to slip and fall on the steep ledge of the building. 

The guy about to fall noticed us just as he started over the edge. Oddly, he looked perfectly calm as he started back, then started to panic when he saw us. We rushed over to try and help him, and just ended up falling over the edge with him; a sixty foot drop.

I remember wondering what would happen. Could we actually die or get injured in Dreamscape? I remember it being said somewhere that dying in a dream just made you wake up, but I had no idea if that was true here or not.

Thankfully, I would not have to find out, as before hitting the ground, the green grass below us began to grow, visibly becoming larger and reaching up as though trying to grab us. The grass broke our fall, preventing us from hitting the ground.

For me and the other guy, the grass then began lowering. For Sam, it kept growing, spreading up and covering his body.

“Oh come on, really?” The guy questioned in annoyance at this as we reached the ground, moving over and starting to climb up the grass stocks holding Sam.

By this point I was too confused and stunned by everything happening to move, and just watched as the guy vanished into the grass, pulling Sam out of it with audible effort; like the grass was struggling against him.

Once Sam was no longer within the grass, it to began shrinking down back to a normal and sensible grass height.

“Sorry about that,” The guy said, “Wasn’t expecting an audience. Guess it’s my fault for going out from such a high floor, should have known people would be walking.” He said with a sigh, slapping his palm against his head, “Well, the name’s Jack, who are you two?”

“What just happened!?” Sam and I questioned in near perfect unison, practically harmonizing in our panic. Jack couldn’t help but snort in amusement at that, “You mean the fall, my being on the roof, or the grass that just grew to catch it?”

“Do we only get an answer about one?” Sam questioned, “If so, I’m asking about the grass.”

“And I’ll ask why you were on the roof.” I added.

Jack laughed again in response, “Fair enough, I guess you probably deserve at least a little info after trying to help me out like that. Didn’t really need it, but oh well. Come on.” Jack said, starting to walk off away from the school.

“What? Where?” I questioned.

“To some place with less Wild grass, that way it doesn’t try and eat either of you again.” He replied.

It wasn’t an unreasonable request, and we followed him away from the school; our needing to wake up and return to the waking world momentarily forgotten.


	3. Chapter 3

“Okay, first thing’s first, thanks for trying to save me,” Jack said as we walked further across the grass, both me and Sam looking down at it constantly in case it decided to jump up and attack us again, “Didn’t need it in the slightest, but you didn’t know that, so I still rank it as a good deed.”

“Right, well, I didn’t want to just leave a guy to fall off the roof. What were you even doing up there?” I asked, looking up from the grass.

Jack chuckled at this, “Well, funnily enough, falling off the roof sort of was what I was doing up there. I mean, I expected it to catch me, which it did, so that part of the process still went fine.”

“Okay, well, why did you want it to catch you?” I tried asking, unsure how to get that the information I wanted.

“So I wouldn’t crack my skull against the ground,” Jack said matter-of-factly, “I mean, not sure if that’s even possible, but I’d rather not have to find out the hard way, which I’m sure you can agree with.”

“I think we’re asking the wrong questions here,” Sam said, looking to Jack, “Why did you want to be outside the school?”

“Oh that,” Jack waved his hand dismissively, “I head out like once a night. Can’t look around the place from inside the school now can I?”

“What’s there to look around for? Isn’t Dreamscape just a wasteland outside of the school?” I asked, looking around at the dirt and rocks around us as we walked towards a particularly tall hill.

Jack raised an eyebrow at me, “You were almost just eaten by a pillar of autonomous grass and you really still think that? I mean, I’ve heard of people sticking to what teachers say but wow, just… just wow.”

I felt my cheeks go slightly red from that, but forced myself not to focus on that as I said, “You still haven’t explained what that was.” I pointed out, wanting some answers about why the ground had been trying to consume us.

“It was Wild Grass,” Jack said, “Grows like bacteria in the presence of panic or otherwise intense emotion. It’s perfect for a landing because it’s hard to be perfectly calm when you’re falling fifty feet.

“Once you’ve stopped falling you just need to relax and they let you go; hence your friend there not having the easiest time getting out of it.”

“And if you don’t relax?” Sam questioned curiously.

“Well then I suspect the grass takes you in, disassembles you, and consumes you bit by bit. Try to avoid that if possible,” Jack said, “And anyway, the Wild Grass isn’t the only thing that grows out here you know.”

“It isn’t?” I asked, growing more interested now, “What else is there?”

Jack smiled, “Well, first of all, there’s that view.” Jack said as we reached the top of the hill, turning me and Sam around to face Dreamscape Academy.

I’d been more than a bit skeptical when Mr. G had said the school had just kept growing more and more since it was built, but it was hard not to believe it now that I could see it.

It seemed to be the thing for which the word sprawling was invented; so massive and constructed at so many odd angles it almost hurt the mind to look at. Even for where we were, it didn’t look real.

By rights the massive tendriling, towering, splintering structure should have collapsed in on itself from its own weight. We couldn’t even see the top of it. It was utterly pants on head, screw through the brain psychotic; but there is was.

Sam was just as speechless as I was, and Jack seemed to be enjoying our reactions to it, laughing when he realized we’d gone almost a whole minute saying nothing, just staring at it boggle eyed.

“Careful, you’ll give yourself a headache trying to figure out where the thing stops and starts.” Jack said, “trust me. I tried mapping the entire thing out, from inside and out, and it’s just not possible. Moves and changes all the time anyway, so what’d be the point?”

“Is that why you came out of the building?” I asked, “To see what it looked like?”

“Kinda,” Jack said, “A mix of that, intense boredom, and someone telling me I couldn’t. That said, I can definitely say that the view isn’t why I kept coming back out here.”

“What was?” Sam asked him, earning a grin from the guy, “Well, since you’re already out here, I guess I may as well give you a crash course on the wildlife of Dreamscape.”


	4. Chapter 4

“Let’s start with the basics,” Jack said as he walked us across the wide open grassy terrain, “You can always spot Wild Grass from the shade of green. It’s always darker than the normal grass surrounding it.”

Sam and I nodded in understanding as we checked the grass we were currently walking over, confirming it to be lighter than the grass Jack pointed to as he gave the explanation.

Jack next pointed to what looked like a line of oak trees that we hadn’t been able to see beforehand due to the large hill between the academy building and where we were now, “Those are called Mind-frayers. Stay away from them if you can help it. If you can’t, at least be sure you know you’re getting close to them before you are.”

“Why?” I asked, unsure what could be dangerous about the trees. Then again, had I not seen it myself, I’d have not known what could be so dangerous about the the wild grass either I guess.

Jack thought for a moment, and seemed to reach the same conclusion, “Walk over to it. Get about ten feet from it and stop. Come back when you’ve figured it out. I’ll be right here, so don’t worry about anything trying to eat you again.”

We’d have probably been less worried had he not reminded us about the possibility of being eaten in Dreamscape. Nevertheless, curiosity won out and soon we were both making strides towards the frayers, mindful not to step on the darker grass on our way over.

When we stopped about ten feet from the trees, a sense of unease washed over me. I wasn’t sure why. There was something… wrong with those trees. They weren’t right. They were watching me, hearing me, and they wanted me to know that they did not approve.

Or maybe I was the one who wasn’t right. I was hoping Sam was feeling it to and I wasn’t just being a wimp freaking out over nothing.

Maybe I was, maybe he already thought I was too much of a crybaby to be friends with anymore, maybe he and Jack were just gonna leave me here and head off together while I got lost, maybe..

I took a step back, eyes widening as I realized that it wasn’t me thinking any of this, it was the trees. When I turned back to Jack, he nodded.

“It’s how they keep things away from them. Anything that gets too close starts doubting itself, starts doubting everything. Not sure what happens if you stay too close for too long, but judging by what I did to my arm when I tried to climb one for the first time, I’d wager it’s something not fun.”

Before I could ask him what he’d done, we both realized Sam hadn’t come back yet. He was on the verge of tears when we pulled him away from it. Once there was more distance between him and it, he quickly returned to normal, seeming embarrassed that he’d reacted like he had.

“Don’t worry about it, only the Crawlers can handle the Mind-Frayers.” Jack said. Preempting the question he probably knew we were both about to ask at once, he elaborated, “Fray Crawlers. They’re these small, white, sluggy looking things. They come out every now and then to feed on Mind-Frayers. Completely immune to the self doubt effect. Not sure why.”

“Coevolution.” Sam said in response to this, “One species directly affects how another evolves, like how anteaters developed long tongs specifically for eating ants.”

“Can something like that even happen here?” I questioned, still unsure how anything could be alive at all in Dreamscape. “A tree almost talked you into depression,” Jack said, “That’s about the point you should stop questioning things.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t find an argument for that, and said nothing as we continued forward, keeping distance between us and the Mindfrayers as we walked. I started to see the Fray Crawlers as we got further, and Jack had been right about them resembling slugs.

They sat motionless, or seemingly motionless, on the bark of the trees, only noticeable because of their bright white coloration against the dark brown of the plant. I supposed they were feeding on them, tiny teeth piercing the bark of the tree and draining it of sap or whatever else Mind Frayers had inside them.

How exactly a tree was growing in dirt that only existed in the minds of many sleeping humans was still well beyond me, but following Jack’s example I’d decided to just allow the information to happen at me, taking it as it came; which became slightly less easy to do the further we went.

“Do either of you feel like we’re being watched?” Sam asked before I would have. I immediately nodded, and strangely Jack seemed to be holding in a snicker as Sam turned his head to look behind us.

I spun around when I heard him gasp, but there wasn’t anything behind us but the wide expanse of dull grass, patches of Wild Grass, and the looming eldritch tower of Dreamscape Academy; the windows so far up no one inside would be able to see us from this far away.

“What is it?” I questioned Sam, who’d begun to shake as he stared at the space behind us like he’s seen an axe murderer. He pointed out at seemingly nothing in particular, seeming more wary now than when he’d gasped.

“Th-there was someone there, I saw them! They were tall and paper thin..” Sam explained to me, “They looked like someone’s shadow had just stood up from the ground..”

It was at this point that Jack’s snickering became more obvious, and me and Sam’s expressions both softened as we realized that he almost certainly knew what was happening.

When we turned to him in unison with matching questioning expressions, he didn’t bother keeping things secret any further and went into explaining immediately. “They’re called Stalkers, one of the creatures the list named first.

“They can get up to fifteen feet tall, but they’ve got no width to them. They can bend and twist their bodies into any shape and can move insanely fast, so if you see them, they’ll only actually be there for less than a second before they hide themselves behind something.

“The one you saw didn't vanish, it’s just flat against the ground. It’ll stay like that until none of us are looking at it, then get up and keep following us.”

“And what’ll it do if it catches us?” I asked, taking Jack’s calmness to mean that he had something with him to keep himself, and hopefully us, safe from the Stalker. To my surprise, Jack just snickered again.

“It won’t catch us. It isn’t trying to. It’s like how the wander wind feeds on confusion. Stalkers feed on anxiety. Physically, they’re harmless, they just follow and try to creep you out. Now that you know what it is, and aren’t producing so much nervousness, it’ll probably wonder off.” He explained further.

“Seriously?” Sam asked, looking back again at the empty space, his expression more curious now than frightened.

Jack nodded, “They usually hunt Angel Doves or Burrow Dreamers, but humans always draw their attention. More naturally skittish I guess.”

“Okay, what are either of those things you just said?” I questioned at the mention of the Dreamscape wildlife.

“Just a few of the other Dreamscape creature’s. There’s a lot to go through ya know?”

“So, did you come up with all of these names?” I asked him.

Jack shook his head, “Naw, just a few of them, like the wonder wind. Don’t think many people ever actually come out here, but I know at least a few did before me, found a little place up ahead that was already built, had a list of Dreamscape creature’s pre-named in it. I’ve found a few that weren’t on the list myself though.”

“What kinds?” Sam said, growing excited to see more Dreamscape wildlife.

Jack paused for a minute before saying, “Well, I’ll tell you what, it’s probably been time for you guys to wake up for awhile now, so we should all probably get back to bed at the academy. Next time, I’ll show you the hut I found, and all the new creatures.”

We both had to stop and think for a moment, but we realized he’d been right. We’d been on our way to wake up when we saw him on the room, so we were probably late for school by now.


	5. Chapter 5

We had in fact been extremely late for school.

I’d been scolded rather harshly by my parents for it, as they’d assumed I’d gotten up early and was already gone, only to have me walk downstairs around noon and ask what was for breakfast.

They were willing to let up a little bit, as they hadn’t checked at all and so couldn’t put all the blame from it on me. I went to school to catch the tail end of the day and gather the little work I’d missed.

I had it done before I even got home of course, and my parents settled down quickly. Perk of having near perfect grades: you get a little more leeway when things go wrong once in awhile.

Sam had a bit less luck than me with his parents, which I could tell from him not being present at school at all that day.

When I met back up with him in Dreamscape, he explained that he’d been taken to the ER.

“My parents get really nervous really easily,” Sam explained, “They were trying to wake me when I was two minutes late getting up for breakfast, called the hospital at ten, and brought me in at about the hour mark when they couldn’t wake me up. I guess it probably would have looked really scary to them, like I’d gone into a coma or something.”

“That’s rough, what’d they say at the ER?” I asked as we headed to our nightly classes.

“Well, they couldn’t find anything wrong with me, and didn’t know what to make of it,” Sam said, “Their best guess was that I’d not gotten enough sleep in the previous nights, and just sorta conked out the first chance I was resting properly.

“They’re gonna bring me back in if I’m asleep passed noon again, but on the bright side, they’ll still have to give me a few extra hours in the morning before they panic.” Sam explained.

I nodded, “Nice. Between that and it being the weekend, we should have plenty of time to meet up with Jack later.”

After that, we worked out a proper schedule to avoid getting stuck far from the school when we needed desperately to leave and wake up. Well, I made a schedule and hammered it into Sam and Jack’s consciousness over the course of the following weeks as Jack showed us around the Dreamscape wilds as he called it.

Slowly but surely, everything got hammered out to the point that we could get through our classes quickly and get outside with Jack to explore the wilds with him. He’d showed us the wooden cabin he’d found, which was the farthest point from the school he’d been to.

It was made out of logs of Mindfrayer, bound in thick, gnarled vines that Jack explained to us were called Theta vines. They focused the mind and counteracted most mind altering effects within Dreamscape; hence them being used to bind the Mindfrayer logs.

“No idea where the cabin came from,” Jack said when he’d showed us in, “I assume I’m not the first person to leave the school and look around the place, and the last people must have set this cabin up to make things easier.

“They left behind a list of the creatures they’d found though. I found some of them, but not all of them. Kinda been my mission to find them all, maybe even add some things too it.”

Me and Sam had both resolved to help him with this, if only because finding more of the bizarre looking, or at least bizarre acting creatures was more fun than anything else we’d ever done in life.

And so, over the months, Jack one by one showed us all the creatures he’d found. We started to consume theta vine-it was not at all pleasant tasting, it was like someone made a raisin out of an asparagus-to explore through the forest of Mindfrayers, finding even more creatures.

Around the end of year one of looking around the wilds, we actually got to experience a fight between two of the creatures. Well, two different kinds, but one was a group of three.

The fight was one we almost missed though, as it was happening in the air and we weren’t able to hear the Angel Doves while being affected by Theta vine. If the Lucid Moth’s wings didn’t make noise while it flew, the entire fight might have completely passed us by without us ever looking up.

Thankfully we managed to look up and see what was happening, jaws dropping as we saw the Lucid Moth being swarmed by three Angel Doves.

The Lucid Moth was what became of the Fray Crawlers when they’d consumed enough from the Mindfrayers, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. The difference was that rather being ever so slightly larger, Lucid Moths were the size of a pregnant school bus.

They could release pure white powder from their wings that acted like a sudden jolt of theta vine, so intense it caused any human who was hit with it to become *too* aware of their surroundings, waking them up from the intensity of the stimulation; as Sam learned when we’d first found one.

And Angel Doves, those were actually more frightening that the giant moth, which was saying a lot. They used a sort of perception trick to make themselves look beautiful, luring things in so they could feed on them.

But since we’d been eating the theta vine, we could see their true form; a grimy, dull grey feathered humanoid, an ugly harpy creature with bent beaks and similarly bent talons at the ends of their feet.

Why they were fighting was beyond me, as the Lucid Moth should have canceled out the Angel Doves’ illusions before they got close enough. I guess that was why the gnarled harpy creatures had chosen to attack in a group.

They couldn’t do too much damage though, as the powder their wings were letting off essentially created a bubble around the moth that the Doves couldn’t pass through. I wasn’t sure what it would do to a Dreamscape creature with no waking form, but I was willing to guess it wasn’t anything good.

The Angel Doves tried to use their wings to blow the powder away, managing to get in and leave a few solid gashes across the Lucid Moth’s body. One attempted to damage the moth’s wings so it would drop, but critically miscalculated when the dust would be expelled from its body.

The Angel Dove was enveloped in the lucid powder, and the avian creature went immediately inert, dropping like a rock and landing in the branches of a Mind frayer.

If the powder’s affects wore off, the Angel Dove would be just as doomed from the tree’s aura.

The second Angel dove was undone by underestimated how aggressive the bug they’d targeted was. The Lucid Moth surged at the second Angel Dove and extending its sharp, spiked appendages used to escape their cocoon and evidently to flay enemies.

It was not a pretty sight, but I couldn’t look away, like a gorey horror movie.

The third Angel Dove saw this and evidently decided that whatever they were after wasn’t worth it. It turned and took off as fast as it could in the other direction, the Lucid Moth mercifully letting to leave and continuing on its way.

Alright, final verdict: do not mess with the moths.


	6. Chapter 6

When Jack brought me closer to the school, I thought I’d misunderstood him, or maybe he’d changed his mind. I figured if we were heading back, that we were done for the night, and we were going to wait for Sam to get outside before seeing the last Dreamscape creature he wanted to show us.

As it happened, I was dead wrong, and realized that around the time we bypassed the Wild Grass, going around the monolithic building. We found what appeared to be an old man, a beggar, leaning against the wall. His body looked dirty and old, wrinkled and clothed in dusty brown clothing.

“Who’s this?” I asked as we approached him. Jack shook his head, “Not who, what. Well, maybe that’s a bit mean, but you get what I mean I hope.”

I looked from Jack back to the beggar man, “he’s.. A Dreamscape creature?” I asked. Jack nodded, “Yep, a Tulpa. Well, kind of. See, the last creature is a bit more complicated to explain than the others.”

“More complicated?” I questioned with mock shock on my face, earning a roll of the eyes from Jack before he continued.

“They start out tiny and invisible, just spores floating through the air. When a bunch of them gather in one place, and a human thinking really hard about something happens to be around, they take form; becoming whatever the person was thinking about at the time. They’re called Tulpas.

“Usually they only last a few hours before just fading back into the spores whence they came to become something new again later, but if a lot of people are all thinking about it at the same time, then it can actually last long enough to develop an actual sentient mind of its own.

“Since I’m guessing that’s what the Tulpas’ actually get their energy from, they can just stick around forever, becoming an Offshoot Tulpa, like Mitch over there.” Jack finished his explanation, and only then were we allowed to walk within earshot of the man.

Jack later explained that this was because Offshoot Tulpas, and Tulpas in general, didn’t actually know what they were. They thought they really were the things that they took the form of, and letting them know they were a Tulpa would instantly send them back to spores.

He wasn’t actually sure if the same thing was true for Offshoot Tulpas, but he didn’t want to risk it with Mitch, who’d apparently been nice to him over the years.

“Mitch was the one who showed me how the use the Wild Grass to get in and out the Academy. He sneaks in at night to steal food.” Jack said.

“There’s food in the building?” I asked, as I couldn’t remember ever eating anything other than the theta vine, or even being hungry, while in Dreamscape.

Jack nodded, “Sorta. It’s an upperclassmen thing I think. When you get to a certain grade they start showing you how to manipulate Dreamscape like a lucid dream. At least that’s what Mitch tells me.”

Mitch nodded, “Yep. Not sure why they teach it, never let ‘em use it in or outta school, but you’ll start getting taught about it in a year or so from the looks of ya.”

“That sounds cool.” I said, though truthfully I wasn’t sure what to think of this information, and wouldn’t really until I saw it.

“In the meantime, let’s get a Tulpa formed so you can see how it works.” Jack said, “The spores can’t really be tracked, but we know they tend to only really form around humans. Like.. well that.”

Jack pointed up at the sky, where I got to see a Tulpa actually form for the first time ever. I caught mid-way through its formation, a ball of orange and grey swirling around in the air in a shape like an egg.

After a few seconds of this, the egg of spores seemed to collapse in on itself, and the rough outline of a dragon flew forward from it, orange flakes of powder still clinging to its scales as it soared.

As it flew and the powder gradually chipped off, its body seemed to slowly take on better shape, and I recognized the crossing pattern on its scales and the hooked design of its tail and claws.

It was a specific dragon, a minor but memorable boss monster from a videogame that had come out last month. “Guess there are a few avid gamers getting bored in school today.” I said, Jack nodding in agreement.

“Let’s hope that one is a temporary,” Jack chuckled.


	7. Chapter 7

And things weren’t just getting more interesting on that front either, Academy was getting more interesting to. 

It started off subtle really, just a few classes about how Dreamscape Academy had been founded; which frankly were the first classes to hold my attention since meeting Jack. I could keep grades ticking over, but the Dreamscape info was actually interesting.

Apparently it had been back in late 1700s, meaning the Academy had been around for over two hundred years. 

I guessed that explained why it was too big to even fathom, if it’d just been growing this entire time.

The first person inside the Dreamscape was a man by the name of Nemo Paulo, a blacksmith turned explorer when he found his way beyond the veil and into another world, one located within his own dreams.

According to his journals, he’d believed he was going mad for quite a long time, until he found someone else within Dreamscape, a fellow traveler. 

He was never able to fully confirm that the person was real, as it turned out they lived on the other side of the planet, but together they traveled Dreamscape, gradually finding more and more dreamers who would appear in the barren land of the world.

Me and Sam both rose eyebrows at this particular comment, knowing for a fact that the land was not barren. 

So when it was said that the group of Dreamscape explorers found a relatively safe spot to build the Academy as a way make sure none became lost in the wasteland, I figured the truth was that they'd built it as a way of making sure no one wondered into a forest of Mind Frayers or into the maw of some other dreamscape creature.

Notably there was no actual mention of how they’d built the school, nor of how they’d managed to make sure all people who entered Dreamscape would appear at the Academy. Jack wasn’t surprised by this, dismissively saying, ‘Fake news,’ when I brought it up to him.

But the classes only got more detailed and interesting as the nights went on. We were shown to a floor we’d never been to before, must have been seventy stories up. 

Mr. G was the instructor whenever we went up that high, which immediately grabbed me and Sam’s attention because we’d never actually seen him teaching a class before, and had started to think he was really just there to greet the new students and explain their situation.

We weren’t the only ones surprised to see Mr. G there, and he smiled in amusement as he recognized the confusion, “Hello students, and congratulations on keeping grades good enough to make it this far. Not all students are able to become Lucids.”

There was a murmur of confusion through the small ground that had gathered in the large room. If was similar to all the normal classrooms, though devoid of chairs, and instead of a chalkboard, the back wall had a massive metal door, like ones you’d see used for a vault.

“Allow me to explain,” Mr. G said, “By now most of you will have likely stopped taking note of the location of this school. You’ve likely been here so long that the fact it’s in your dreams is likely a trivial one at this point, but do not mistake the power of this location.

“Most of you may have learned from talking to others that people who do not enter the academy have ‘normal’ dreams. Even here in Dreamscape Academy the exact cause and nature of these dreams are not fully understood. 

“Some think them to be nothing more than random combinations of things that the dreamer knows or is thinking about in the day time, others think that their dreams have meaning, that their subconscious uses them as a way to speak with their conscious mind by portraying symbolic representations.

“But regardless, the common thread among them is that the dreamer does not have control over them. Their dreams are not physical places they enter like us, but rather something akin to movies playing in their mind, or memories of things that never happened.

“And then there are those who learn to control their dreams. They become aware of the fact that their within a dream, and as a result are able to manipulate what they experience in their sleep. It never becomes as real as it is for us, but you get the idea.”

Mr. G paused for us to take in the information, then smiled, “The ability to manipulate one’s dreams is not something unique to ‘normal’ dreams. The same thing can be done here in Dreamscape, allowing the more intelligent and aware people within it to bend the rules of the realm to their will.” 

The confusion, and more to the point skepticism, was tangible in the room. Mr. G’s smile never wavered as he paused to let us digest the information before continuing.

“Perhaps a demonstration is in order.” He said, and no sooner had his words ended did he vanish. It wasn’t a slow fade away, there was no pop or crack or sound at all to it. He was just there and then gone, like a jarring jump cut from a bad 80s movie.

The gasping from the students, myself included, was almost simultaneous. When we heard Mr. G’s laughter from behind us, we quickly turned and found him seated on a literal golden throne, gemstones of every color embedded in the chair and a royal purple rug at his feat.

The regal look did somewhat clash with the cartoony spiral glasses that had appeared on his face, the large wide brimmed sun hat on his head, and the glass of lemonade complete with miniature umbrella and swizzle straw he was drinking from.

We stared at him silently for a moment before one of the more inquisitive students questioned, “What.. how.. What?” Which admittedly was more coherence than anyone else had mustered at the moment.

“Lucidity.” Mr. G replied, and in another magical 80s jump cut he was back in front of the vault door, the chair, rug, hat, and glasses gone; though he’d kept the lemonade, evidently still thirsty.

“It’s an extremely useful and powerful ability,” Mr. G continued, “And it was using this power that the founders of the Academy were able to create the building in the first place, able to make it ever growing to accommodate the students, and ever present so that all new students appeared within the walls of the school instead of being lost to the wasteland outside of it.”

I raised my hand, asking, “So you’re going to teach us how to control Dreamscape?”

The others undoubtedly had the same question. It was hard to believe even after seeing it, since if everyone could control the reality of Dreamscape, I didn’t see how the place was still coherent or even in tact at all.

“Yes and no,” Mr G said, “You will learn to control aspects of the world around you, but you’ll not have total control. No one does, not even us teachers. 

“The realm has certain natural limiters on it to prevent utter mayhem from breaking out, much the same way that physics act to prevent similar chaos in the waking world. 

“Furthermore, I’ll not be the one teaching you how. You’ll be teaching yourselves.” Mr G pointed his thumb to the vault door, “through that door is a room. It is a completely empty, twenty by twenty foot grey tile room. 

“Coincidentally, it is also the most powerful room in this entire school.

“Within it, lucidity becomes more natural and easy to maintain for longer periods of time for reasons not yet understood. What we do know is that the vault door prevents the lucidity from spreading everywhere and unleashing chaos. 

“We know that once inside, the door remains, but the walls seem to fall away, allowing the one inside to explore realms entirely fabricated from their mind. 

“And we know that these realms your mind creates are all not only personalized by your subconscious, but personalized in such a way as to teach your conscious mind how to hang on to the feeling and understanding of lucidity even once you’ve left the room. 

“Once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be able to draw on that feeling and alter the world around you even with the vault door closed. It’s imperative that all of you learn self control, and not show or mention your powers to the lower classmen. We don’t need them attempting to sneak up to the vault. 

“Now, if you’re all ready,” Mr. G turned to the vault door and began turning the massive handle on it, “I believe it’s time for your first lesson.”


	8. Chapter 8

It was unbearable waiting for our individual turns in the vault. There was only one vault, so the entire class could only go in one at a time. 

The rest of the class had to just attend normal classes whenever they were waiting.

Through keeping track of when students came back and left I worked out that everyone was getting about an hour and a half each in the vault before trading out, getting automatic credit in whatever class they missed at the time.

It was set up to where the entire class would have had a turn once per week. It was about halfway through the next week before I got my first turn in the vault. 

Mr. G was there to open and close the massive vault door for me, and I was practically shaking.

I think it was mostly out of not knowing what to actually expect. There was no one who could possibly tell me what I’d end up seeing because it would literally be my own brain making it up for me the moment I went inside.

I heard from a few of the other students who’d gone in before me to think of it as a video game, a competitive game where it was me vs my brain. 

Jack had said something similar, though he seemed.. Strangely wary about the whole thing.

“Don’t like the idea of being locked in a room,” Jack explained, “And I like the idea of being trapped inside of my own mine even less. Wigs me out. In fact, here.” Jack had given me a few pieces of Theta vine to carry in my pocket.

He told me to just scarf them down if I got too nervous or overwhelmed during the vault. He gave Sam the same. Supposedly the hyper awareness they brought on would cancel out the vault’s lucidity effects and let us auto-end the game.

I didn’t plan to use them, but honestly knowing I had an immediately way out if I needed one did kinda make it easier to handle going through the vault door, which immediately had only started making me nervous after seeing how worried Jack was about it, but that’s neither here nor there.

I stepped into the room, finding it exactly like Mr. G had described it, just a simple, empty tile room. 

“Good luck.” Mr. G said as he shut the door behind me. I could hear the metallic sound of the lock as it turned shut.

I stared at the empty room, waiting for whatever was going to happen to happen, afraid that looking away would cause me to miss something. 

It was nerve racking waiting for it to start, and already thinking/over thinking what I would have to do.

The change happened so gradually I hardly noticed it. It was like when you stare at one of those magic eye pictures or at pattern lines on the floor, and start to see images forming without anything actually moving. 

Like an optical illusion. Like the image was always there, but presented in such a way that your eyes didn’t notice at first, until it slowly bled over into it and allowed you to see what was really there.

How precisely that same thing happens with an empty tile room and a flaming volcanic demon scape is well beyond me, but there I was standing in the center of a brimstone platform, smoke and flickering embers rising up all around me.

I blinked a few times, looking around. I couldn’t see the vault door, or any of the walls for that matter. I could hear movement around me, like.. 

Okay, bare with me on this one, it was like a porcelain spider’s legs skittering across hard stone. 

Does that make any sense? It’s the only way I can think to describe it. And needless to say, I was in no hurry to see what was making that noise, so turned and bolted off in the opposite direction.

I found a bridge of dark stone allowing me to leave the platform and make my way to what appeared to be a full on mountain of the stuff, the smoke and fire getting less and less dense the further up the unnaturally shaped stone stairs I got. 

I took a deep breath once I got above the smoke, and took note of everything around me. I couldn’t see anything below me, the smoke too thick to make out anything other than the flickers of fire that floated up. 

Above me was just more stairs leading further up. I couldn’t see the top of the mountain, or if it even had a top. Looking around, the mountain I was on appeared to be the only thing in any direction. 

I wondered for a moment if there had been more than one bridge, or just more than one way off that starting platform. 

If it was supposedly like a video game, maybe there was more than one way to win?

But before I could put much more thought into that, I heard the spidery sounds again and took off up the stairs again to avoid them, not knowing what they were and having no desire to find out today. 

Something about the sound, the way it was so constant, just messed with me on an almost instinctual level.

As I ran faster up the stairs, which turned to climbing up them as the steepness of them made it necessary to use both my hands and feet as well, I contemplated using the Theta vine if the spider things got close to me, but decided against it. 

All of the other students got through this and didn’t seem to have anything wrong with them. After all it was just something created from my own mind right? Lord what was I thinking about that sent me here?

I kept climbing, which gradually turned to just sort of hanging on the thing as it got too steep for me to continue climbing. I swear it turned into a full overhang, curving above me and leading back down into the smoke somewhere else.

With my two options being attempt to monkey bar climb my way down or face the porcelain spiders, I opted for door number three and let go. I hadn’t been expecting the sensation of falling to be so… real. 

I could feel the wind rushing passed me. More to the point I could feel every cell in my body screaming at me for doing something almost certain to harm me, every part of my body tricked into thinking the fall was real and I was about to be harmed by it.

I’ve no idea when I stopped falling. I guess technically I wasn’t ever really falling at all was the point. 

Kinda like how the room had slowly bled into the demon scape of smoke and spiders, I gradually became aware of the fact that I was laying face down on the tile floor inside the vault room, the game or test or whatever having ended for the time being.

Mr. G let me out. Evidently despite what I viewed as an utter shrieking failure, I’d lasted a few minutes longer than the average student did on their first time through, which I guess I could be a little proud of if nothing else.

From talking to the other students after class before we snuck out the window with the Wild grass, we found that almost all of the landscapes had involved an unfamiliar biome with different set routes and something chasing the student, usually not looking or not sounding like what it actually was. 

There were students whose experiences differed of course, one redhead girl reported that she’d appeared locked in chains at the bottom of a well. Nothing had chased her and wells weren’t unfamiliar to her, as she had one in her backyard and she’d always had a small fear of actually falling into it.

Sam would later report having been lost in a maze like jungle with ant hills that rose higher than the trees. He’d been pursued by perfectly spherical metallic rodents that seemed entirely unaffected by gravity.

I started to ask him how he knew they were rodents when they’d just been orbs and more to the point been gunmetal grey.

I guess he knew the same way I knew I’d been chased by earthenware spiders when I’d not even seen them and only heard their feet as they skittered across the ground.

“Sounds like a trip,” Jack said when we told him about it, staring up at the sky as he tried to count the lengths between the thick nodules in the Neural Sparks web, “Didn’t have to use the vine?” He asked.

“No, we figured we’d try and see how things went.” I explained, Jack chuckling in response, “Sounds like things went off a cliff for you and into an ant hill for Sam.”

“Well yeah, but it’s not like it hurt or anything.” Sam said defensively, “It faded out before I even saw the ants. Hills might have even been empty I think, just a long drop like how Colin’s ended.”

“How’d yours go?” I asked Jack, curious what kind of mini-scape his mind had cooked up. I was picturing a forest of upside down Mindfrayers with a Lucid Moth dragon and actually hostile Stalkers for him, but he shook his head, “I’m keeping that close to the chest.” He said.

“What? Why?” I questioned, “We both told you ours.” 

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to, weren’t asked to, and probably shouldn’t have.” Jack retorted, “Look it’s nothing personal, I’d just rather not go in detail about a literal physical representation of my inner thoughts, and frankly I’m surprised either of you did.”

Me and Sam quieted down at that. Truthfully, I think the fact that we’d felt so physically present in them had made it easy to forget that we’d been inside our own heads, everything we saw meaning something. 

Could Jack have already learned stuff about us we didn’t even know just from us describing the experience? He certainly seemed to think that we’d learn something about him if he told us.

Which just begged the question of what about him he didn’t want us to know.


	9. Chapter 9

As the month progressed, so to did both my Dreamscape studies and my Dreamscape creature hunting with Jack and Sam. Regular school continued on as well, but there was hardly anything to report.

I think my parents had started to get slightly worried thinking about it. Other than Sam, who as far as they knew I never actually hung out with, I didn’t seem to have any friends and didn’t do much of anything but read and study; which in many cases were the exact same activity.

In Dreamscape though, while Sam and Jack still were the only ones I’d call actual friends, I’d actually grown a decent sized circle of acquaintances. None that I told about the Dreamscape creatures of course, that required a unanimous vote of me, Sam, and Jack. 

But the vault experiences, which we’d started referring to as The Deep Sleep, turned out to be a great way to get to know the other students in Dreamscape.

Doing so made me realize how introverted I’d been even in Dreamscape, only ever talking with Jack or Sam about stuff no one else knew or even really cared about. But now the entire class had something anyone could talk about and be interesting with at any time.

Clara, the redhead who’d had the bizarre well and chains Deep Sleep, shot up from one of the least to most popular students talking all the strange things that happened in her vault time. 

I was sure that some of what she talked about was embellished a bit, but by the third week of Deep Sleep, everyone fudged their stories at least a little, myself included.

Three times through and I’d still not actually seen the spiders chasing me visually, but as far as the others were considered I’d had to fight them off at least once, using a manmade landslide to knock them off the cliff. 

This did actually happen, but I hadn’t seen the spiders while doing it; nor had it been done on purpose. I’d simply been trying to climb faster and my foot kicked some loose stones free, which had turned into a mini-avalanche as they went down. It was another score for dumb luck at best.

Jack still kept quiet about what his Deep Sleeps were like, and after that first conversation, so did me and Sam, at least around him. 

We’d some to agree that there probably wasn’t anything wrong with talking about it, especially now the whole class was on about it, but Jack personally wasn’t comfortable with it, and we figured we’d respect his view on it.

The more I got into talking with other Dreamscape students, the less time I ended up devoting to searching for the another wildlife, which did somewhat annoy Jack.

It was about four months before we discovered the new Dreamscape creature, though once we found it, we realized we’d actually been living alongside it the entire time without even knowing it.

The Neural Sparks, as the list had named them, weren’t visible with the human eye unless you’d consumed a borderline irresponsible amount of Theta vine. 

We found them when Jack decided he wanted to try figuring out what was at the center of an Empty zone once and for all.

Zones, as Jack had described them to us on one of our first outings, were sentient, living territory. They could be identified by a shimmer effect at their border, or by bright sparks when two were colliding with each other. 

Zones had a habit of inducing certain emotions or feelings into those who wandered into them. Anger, obsession, forgetfulness, etc. Empty zones were an oddity though. Nothing that went in ever seemed to come back.

Sam thought that eating a few metric tons of Vine would let Jack keep his wits about him.

When he’d finished the literal pile of vines we’d brought him, his eyes widened as he looked around us, beginning to describe what he was seeing. Curious, we tried to gather more vines so we could see it to.

The only way to describe it was like spider web. Thick, blue, pulsating spider web, minus any spiders thankfully, as seeing a spider capable of making this web, which stretched out in all directions too far to see the end of might have given me a heart attack.

The Neural Sparks, as we learned, were billions upon billions of tiny organisms, given energy through intense thought, all binding themselves together into a complex web so they could essentially harvest more thought and processing power from everything within their web. 

The entire species worked together, and as they were on an altogether higher plane than everything else, had no natural predator, allowing them to become near all encompassing within Dreamscape.

The only places the Sparks weren’t spreading was into an Empty Zone, which is what put an end to that particular mission. Either way, that was a new Dreamscape creature checked off the list. Nine left.


	10. Chapter 10

It wasn’t long after finding the Neural sparks that we found another creature. We saw it way out from the first row of Mind Frayers, and found a body before we found one alive, an odd blue lizard-like body with legs that divided into spiky, webbed limbs. 

It was hard to tell for sure what it was, since when we found it, it was being consumed by a hungry patch of Wildgrass.

Later on though we found a live one. Five limbs, all of them odd, gangly, webbed things going out in all directions from its reptilian body. It was only about the size of a hand, hence Jack nicknaming it the Hand Lizard for its five limbs, which could be considered the fingers.

It’s real name we found on the list, a Blue Fade. We weren’t sure why it had that name until we happened on a Flick Fly who’d recorded the memory of one of them feeding.

All three of us had gotten into the habit of checking any and all Flicker Flies we came across. The memories they played were usually only a few seconds long, with the longest I’d ever found being five minutes-though Jack swears he once found one that played for a half hour.

The fly had been buzzing around the edges of a Mass Hive; a sort of ant-like Dreamscape creature that behaved more as a liquid than a solid.. Jack caught it in his hands, then parted his fingers so the light would shine through and show us what it had seen. 

In front of us appeared a slightly dim view of the Mass Hive, the image a few feet above the actual hive itself. 

A Blue Fade had crawled passed the edge, and was using its mouth, located on the bottom of its body, to eat/drink up Ids. Whenever a large flood of them gathered to try driving it off, it vanished into nothing right then and there.

With a little research we found that its body wasn’t entirely visible. It had a long, hooked tail jutting from the center of its back, but it was unseen and untouchable; present only on that higher place that the Neural Sparks occupied. 

When in danger, was able to use the Neural Sparks as an instant evacuation, hooking on of the connective strands with its tail and essentially pulling itself out of reality and onto the higher place. 

We learned that it could only stay up for about a minute at most before it was forced back down, but as it was able to crawl along the Neural Sparks extremely fast, it would almost certainly be away from whatever had been trying to harm it.

This got Sam wondering if we could touch the Sparks to, whenever we’d consumed enough Theta vine to see them. Jack volunteered to test it out, but me and Sam vetoed the idea. 

“I was just thinking out loud, we shouldn’t actually try it,” Sam said, “If we can touch it, it might be seriously dangerous. What if it shocks you? Or stings, or bites or whatever a sentient web does.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jack said dismissively, munching down vine, “Worst case scenario, it hurts a lot and you douse me in Lucid powder to wake me up. Simple as that.” He said.

When it had occurred to us how potentially dangerous what we were doing could be, we’d gotten the idea to harvest powder from Lucid Moths for an emergency exit if need be. 

We’d only needed it once so far when I’d stupidly walked a few steps into an Empty Zone, and according to Jack forcing myself awake with dream monster dust was a safer bet than attempting to backtrack the two steps I’d taken. 

Considering that, in the moment, I hadn’t even been able to understand what he’d meant by backtracking, already forgetting how I’d gotten in, I think he may have been right. 

We made a point of specifically marking all the Empty Zones in a wide radius, no matter how small, so we didn’t end up wandering into one again.

But neither me nor Sam felt that it would be a decent strategy for touching the Neural Sparks, “Seems like the kind of thing that would cause damage right away.” Sam said, Jack rolling his eyes at this.

“Seems like and what if are two of the most useless statements in the language. We can’t know for sure until we physically try it.” Jack said, continuing to wolf down theta vine so he could go for it.

Knowing we wouldn’t be able to convince him, and that he was right about us not having any actual evidence to it being dangerous, we simply stood by with Lucid powder in hand just in case he needed it.

Once he could see the Sparks and the connections between them, Jack took a deep breath and reached out slowly to touch one. Me and Sam tensed as we watched, expecting to see Jack recoil in pain or just back or black out or something.

Instead, nothing much happened at all. 

He grabbed the Neural Spark’s link and it didn’t even acknowledge him. He pulled, squeezed, and finally hefted himself up into the web, but there were no negative effects whatsoever. 

“See? Who said recklessness never discovered anything?” Jack bragged as he began tightrope walking up the spark link; which to us just appeared to be him walking across the air up towards the sky, as we weren’t currently able to see the sparks.

Naturally we followed him up as soon as we’d gotten enough Theta vine down to perceive the Sparks and began climbing over Dreamscape with him. 

Sam’s best guess was that the Neural Sparks had learned that it was less likely to be damaged by other creatures if it was docile to all, hence the Blue Fade being able to climb along it for safety. 

But it was while climbing on the Neural Sparks that we found something new. Something that, at first, we didn’t even think was on the list at all. 

Being able to climb up high into the air with the Neural Sparks let us see farther than we’d ever been able to on foot. We were expecting to be able to use this for all kinds of incredible things. 

We weren’t expecting to find the gate marking the edge of Dreamscape.


	11. Chapter 11

It was borderline surreal. I know how that probably sounds considering we found it while climbing along the length of an ethereal living web spread across the sky of a world within the mind, but it really was. Beyond the thickest Mindfrayer forest we’d ever seen, there it was, a massive brass gate.

We climbed down to inspect the gate, finding it to be ten feet high and not have any actually location where it possible to open and crawl through. We couldn’t climb over, as the bars were spiked along the front and top to prevent just that.

And most unsettling, we couldn’t crawl over with the Neural Sparks. Much like it did over the Empty Zones, there weren’t any parts of it growing over the gate. 

It got close enough that we might possibly have been able to jump from the web and land on the other side, but none of us thought this was a good idea. Even if we cleared the spiked fence and weren’t impaled, that was still a long fall into a location exhibiting a similar trait to an Empty Zone.

We knew it wasn’t an Empty Zone though because there was still grass and Mindfrayers on the other side of the gate. Somehow that made the sense of unease I got as I looked through the gate’s bars even more upsetting. I’d know what was happening if it was just a fenced off Empty Zone.

Not even Jack had any idea what was happening here.

“Maybe this is another Dreamscape creature.” Sam suggested, “We crawled here on a living web from a higher plane, not too hard to believe that this gate could be a creature to.” 

“It’s not impossible, but even for Dreamscape it doesn’t add up,” Jack said, “This gate looks man made, and even if it is a living creature that wants to look like its been built, then why a gate? What’s the point?” He shook his head, “No, someone else has been out here, and there’s something out there they don’t want anyone else getting in to see.”

“Do you think that’s where the people who made the list went?” I asked, Jack pausing at the question, staring through the bars.

“Might be.. Might be..” He said thoughtfully, walking closer to the bars, trying to get as close as he could get without the spikes on the bars sticking him in the face. He seemed… longing.

“Alright, how do we get passed it?” Jack questioned. 

“Are you sure we should?” I asked, “The Neural Sparks won’t go near the place, isn’t that a bad sign? What if it’s worse than an Empty Zone?”

Thankfully this at least gave Jack pause for thought, preventing him from attempting to climb up or over the gate. 

It didn’t last long of course, Jack’s relationship with hesitation was nearly non-existent, and he was back to trying to figure out how to get over the gate after just a few moments. But the extra time, little though it may have been, gave the reason to stay away enough time to make itself known.

It wasn’t so much a sound as a feeling that came over all three of us as it approached. It drew all three of us to look through the gate, staring silently through the bars and into the shadows searching for movement.

The movements were small, but the longer we stared at them the more we saw, even if we couldn’t pin down what it was in the shadows that was twisting, swirling, and twining between the shadows.

It was then that I realized that we couldn’t see the ground through the shadows anymore. They were shadows, they were pure blackness. Blackness that was stretching passed the edges of the trees as though growing out of them.

For a moment I thought I saw eyes. Two white, lifeless dots in the center of the dark mass of nothing making up whatever was moving towards the gate. Then I realized there weren’t only two, there were four. No ten, twenty.. 

The shadowy wave of nothing I could properly explain had white spots, pin pricks of brightness, spread across and through it. Watching them while it moved was slightly nauseating, like watching a gruesomely poor animation of a merry go round. 

The form poured and flowed over itself and out from the trees. I’m sure the move from stillness to breakneck speed was more gradual than it seemed, but looking at it was so entrancing that by the time I noticed how fast it was moving it was crashing against the brass spiked gate.

The structure vibrated from the collision, the sound and sight of the movement making all of us jump back, Sam landing in a sitting position and kicking back away from the gate. 

Not that I was complaining, but I couldn’t understand why the creature couldn’t push through the bars. It looked like a liquid, or even a gas; if physical descriptions could even really apply to it. 

It should have been able to move through or over the gate with ease, but it remained within the gate, which hadn’t actually been damaged by its supposed charge.

And then, just as quickly as it had revealed itself, the creature sank back into the trees, leaving no trace on the ground nor the trees that it had been moving over or through them, vanishing entirely and leaving the three of us in silence.

Somehow I was the one to find my words first. “What.. what was that?” 

“For the first time in my life.. I haven’t even got a guess..” Jack said, staring in shock into the forest beyond the gate, “There’s nothing on the list that I can think of that even remotely matches that thing.”

“What about the one on the back?” I asked. Jack went quiet again, first trying to figure out what I meant, then looking down to the ground as his mind rifled through the implications of what we’d just found.

“Guys, we need to get back,” Sam said, making me thankful that at least one of us was mindful on a more practical level, “If we don’t, the vines will wear off and we’ll stuck on the other side of this wall of Mindfrayers.”

“He’s right,” I agreed, looking up at the Neural Sparks. Taking the time it took us to climb over and the time we’d been here at the gate, we’d probably just barely be able to climb back before we lost the ability to see the webs and were trapped.

Jack nodded and went to the Sparks to start climbing up, “Fair enough. Back to the cabin first, figure this out later.” 

We could both agree with this, and so began climbing back the way we’d come in sullen silence. My thoughts never left the massive blur of a beast beyond the gate, how could it? The other two were probably thinking about it to as we went.

We did thankfully manage to get back in time, just as the Neural Sparks faded from out view. In fact I was still on the webbing when our ability to perceive that realm left us, and I landed on my head. I was only a foot or so off the ground at the time, so it was really more of an inconvenience than anything.

“That was a close one huh?” Sam said as he helped me up. I nodded, “Can you imagine if we’d ended up landing in a Frayer?”

Jack stayed silent as he jogged all the way back to the cabin, lifting the list off the table and scanning the back of it, eyes focusing on the marked out name left there. When we caught up with him, he was basically glaring at the page.

“I’ve been wondering what this thing was since I found this cabin,” Jack said, “I thought it was a mistake or a joke or something. But if you’re right, and this name was supposed to go to that thing.. Then it means they wanted to hide it.”

“Which explains the gate.” I said. 

“Exactly,” Jack said, looking out the window in the direction we’d found the creature, his expression softening from frantic to thoughtful, “my friends, I think it’s time to change our mission statement.”


	12. Chapter 12

Jack pinned the list up on the wall of the cabin, backwards with the marked out name in full view. There wasn’t any way for us to figure out what the name was, so underneath it Jack had elected the name Nightmare.

The rest of the list had information about the creature written further down on the page with lines connecting it to the correct name, and since the back of it was blank, we were able to use all of it for the single creature.

Granted, there wasn’t a whole lot of info about it. 

‘Big,’ ‘Caged in, possibly by former list makers,’ ‘Negates Neural Sparks,’ ‘Bizarre physical properties, liquid + gas + ethereal blackness = ??? unable to bypass spiked cage gate. Spiked gate likely constructed through lucidity.’

Passed that we didn’t have much of anything. But Jack was determined to find out more. Sam and I attended classes like normal of course, but unlike before Jack didn’t wait for us for to back out and look, and I’m not even sure he returned to classes regularly, because we never saw him leaving the academy in the following weeks.

Even still we didn’t manage to learn much more. We added one new fact to the list in the entire first month of studying it, that being that the Nightmare didn’t show itself often. We only actually saw it once more towards the middle of the month. 

It wasn’t much different from the first encounter either. It slithered from the trees, mesmerized all three of us as we watched, rammed at the gate, caused it to shift slightly but found it to be otherwise ineffective, and retreated back from whence it came.

The only factor that seemed to change was a matter of our focus. Jack was staring through the gate like he’d grown used to, nearly needling himself with the spikes. But Sam and I had gotten more than a little unfocused at the time.

Frankly I don’t think it was unjustifiable. We’d gotten through two months without seeing anything, and on top of that the Deep Sleep had only gotten more interesting as all the students had figured out more and more how to get further in their respective worlds.

Neither one of us was thinking about the Nightmare despite that being our goal in coming back to the gate, which made it all the more odd that it chose that moment to re-appear, driving Jack away from the gate.

When we got back to mark this on the list, we could only assume that it was a matter focus. Only Jack had actually been expecting it the second time, and none of had been the first time. 

Was our unawareness what was attracting it? 

It was an unsettling thought, and rather painted it as a sort of hunter, a non-newtonian vulture that preyed on those who weren’t prepared for its presence. 

“So we’ve got a scavenger hunting sentient wave of shadows that can sense when you aren’t ready for it,” Sam said, “I’m starting to see why it was caged up by whoever found it first. Can you imagine if that thing got loose in Dreamscape?”

“Must have been Lucids,” I realized, “Powerful, powerful Lucids if they managed to make such a massive barrier.” I said. We’d tried to map out the gate to find the entire way around it, but it didn’t seem to have an end no matter how far we looked in any given direction, making it seem more like a separate section of Dreamscape than a sealed of part of it. 

“No kidding,” Jack said, “I’ve seen some crazy stuff with the Dreamscape creatures and the Tulpas, especially the Offshoots, but I’ve never seen anything like this thing. Who knows what it’s capable of.”

“Let’s try not to think about it.” I said, “It’s already sealed off, so there’s no need to deal worry about it right?”

“Maybe not,” Jack said, “Both times we’ve seen it, the gate shook when it was charged. It wasn’t much, but it’s chipping it’s way through. It might not happen soon, but I don’t think that gate is going to hold.”

“I guess it’s probably been a long, long time since it was put together by whoever put it up in the first place,” Sam said, “Makes sense it’d be weakening.. But what can we do about that?” 

“We can become Lucids,” I said, “If we can learn how to use those powers like Mr. G and the other teachers, then we might be able to fix the barrier up and make sure the Nightmare never gets out.”

“Shame we’d never get a chance to actually study the thing,” Jack said with a sigh, “But I’m with you. If it really is what we think it is, it’s way too dangerous to be let out. Sam?” He asked.

He nodded in agreement, “I don’t like the idea of going back to that thing if it’s trying to eat us, but if it means making sure it never gets the chance, it’s worth the risk at least. If we can get to that point.”

“We’ll have to work even harder on the Deep Sleep.” I said.

“And I’ll have to make up for the.. Week or so that I just didn’t show up.” Jack said, scratching the back of his head. 

I nodded in agreement, “I know you don’t like talking about the Deep Sleep, but maybe if we do we can help each other get through it?”

Jack shook his head, “Sorry, but no. I know you mean well, but from what I’ve seen, and more to the point what I’ve heard, the Sleep is a bit too personal for that. We can get through it ourselves.”

I sighed, resisting the urge to throw one of Jack’s many snarky comments back at him and just nodding instead, “Alright, alright.”

Jack smiled, “Time to hit the books for real.”


	13. Chapter 13

My poor, poor, beautiful schedule. So much effort, all down the drain. 

But thankfully the new one was much easier to write up because there were now only two things to balance: normal school and Dreamscape Academy. 

When I actually looked at it, it kinda worried me how much my normal school grades had started to slip. Since finding the Nightmare any focus I’d had in the waking world had been napalmed into the ground. 

I’d foregone taking notes on my classes to write out theories about Dreamscape creatures, and attempted sketches of the Nightmare. 

I was a terrible artist to be sure, but thankfully the creature was less physical and more sentient emotion, making it easier to visualize and draw out. 

Or at least that’s how it always came out when I was trying to draw it out, who knew how accurate it actually was.

There wasn’t much I could do to fix my… let’s say lack luster social status, as by this point I could just about be described in the waking world as a person that existed and that’s about it, and even that was up for debate in some cases. 

But I could still go into damage control with grades. If I ever had any natural skills, it was for keeping track of things and making schedules around it. Not exactly a very utility focused skill but it had its moments.

Even with the Nightmare mucking about in my brain my Dreamscape grades hadn’t wavered of course, the odd natural aura of focus that circulated through the realm made it difficult to not retain information during class, hence my writing up the Dreamscape wildlife during waking school instead of sleeping ones.

The only area where I was technically struggling was the Deep Sleep of course, but no more or less than anyone else in class frankly. 

I couldn’t help but notice that everyone in class, regardless of skill level, seemed to have followed the same rough pattern of progression within the vault.

Everyone’s first few times in had essentially been a horror movie, then there’d been a few weeks of steady progression through their world as they gained more confidence and began to explore the area, but now everyone had hit more or less a giant wall and weren’t able to progress much further,

Personally I’d managed to find my way passed the curved mountain by climbing on top of it instead of trying to climb along the bottom. 

I’d found a literal staircase leading down in the opposite direction of the starting position and down to what I could only assume was the actual ground level of my world; a floor of black ash.

But passed that I wasn’t sure what to do next. I try to run forward, something pounds me into the dirt. I try to head back up the staircase, I get pounded into the dirt. I try to hide behind the staircase for cover, something sneaks around it and pounds me into the dirt.

It was all in the vault for I didn’t actually feel any pain from it of course,just a deep numbing sensation and a profound sense of ‘well this sucks’ as I was wailed on against the ashen ground.

Sam reported a similar situation with a pit he’d found a way to in his Sleep. He’d found a way to sneak through the trees and end up in this open area, but once he got down into it the edges rose up into walls, like a giant bowl around him.

It made it impossible for him to escape the rodents as they rolled in over the cliffs and began eating him. 

Like me he felt no actual pain from it, but the idea of being eaten alive was enough to put shivers through me, even before I started trying to picture what it would even look like from perfectly spherical metal rats, or porcelain spiders that I’d since learned actually had ten legs.

Even Clara in her odd land of wells and chains had reached a point she couldn’t get passed. She’d found her way out of the well through a hole halfway up in, allowing her to crawl through and climb along the chains hanging in what appeared to be a void.

From there she’d entered a tunnel where any step in any given direction caused all the bricks to animate and launch towards her, pelting her with bricks before the entire tunnel collapsed in on her.

But despite the walls that everyone was running into, literally in some student’s cases, a few did start to make a little more progress over the winter month. 

Classes were suspended over the holiday, but since nothing actually stopped us from appearing in the academy, we were still given the option of going into the vault for more practice, which of course everyone with a brain did, myself and Sam included. 

Granted for us there was more of a vested interested, but the point is the same.

The difficulty walls had become so universal in all our versions of the Deep Sleep, even in the bizarre and different ones like well girl, that when people started finding ways passed them, word got around quickly.

It started with a guy named Corsi. Not sure where he was from in the waking world, but his land in the vault was reportedly equal parts desert and tundra, sand and snow scattered together, glaciers poking out of sand dunes, with thorned narwhal somehow chasing him across the land.

Like the rest of us he’d reached a point of no crossing. In his case it took the form of a sand patch breaking off and leaving him surrounded by boiling water full of the narwhals and lord only knew what other kinds of greables.

He tried to stay on it and it sank into the water. If he tried to jump into the water and swim through he got pincushioned by narwhals. He tried to jump to one of the other chunks of land before they could break away and it sank instantly into the water.

“How’d you finally get passed it?” Sam questioned, both of us having gathered with the rest of the small group come to ask how he’d gotten passed his point of no crossing.

“I didn’t,” Corsi said, “I realized that there wasn’t any way passed it, so I just looked for a different way passed. Found a ladder of sandstone leading up a glacier in a different direction from the boiling water and climbed up it instead, nary a narwhal in sight.” 

This was a bit of a shock to everyone else. We’d all been assuming there was only one path through. We were seeing something new in our vault land, so it had to have been the way forward. 

None of us had yet entertained the idea that it was literally just a dead end, a trap to distract and stall us from progress.

It seemed that the entire student body had to start thinking outside the box. And once everyone was on the same page, things started moving forward again, like a Christmas present to Dreamscape Academy.

Instead of taking the stairs leading down towards the ash pit, I sprinted across the curved bridge. 

It took a few tries, the spiders continually catching up to me, but eventually I reached the end of it and found the first plant life in my world, some ancient dead grass scattered across a black stone cliff, with what looked like a building carved into the mountain it lead into.

Inside was essentially the next sequel to Saw, a demented mazed of puzzles and traps and doors that opened into a wall of fire or floods of porcelain centa-spiders. 

It was frustrating on a very deep level, but unlike the pit of ash and death I’d found before, there at least seemed to be a very clear way forward through it; I just hadn’t found it yet.

Sam did the same with his jungle land, finding a way over the pit so he could climb with vines and avoid it entirely. It took him a few tries to get through to the next section, as he kept slipping and landing in the inescapable pit, but eventually he reached the next section, a hedge maze of orb rodents and thorns.

Once again, everyone’s vault lands were falling into the same kinds of categories, with those few exceptions like Clara, who’s next section involved no mazes or trap rooms, just a wall of chains she had to climb up without falling off.

“Are you sure it isn’t just another fake out trap room again? Like, can you even make it to the top of the chains?” I asked her one day/night after our classes. Clara nodded, “Yeah, I think its possible, I’m just not good at climbing.” She said half-jokingly.

I chuckled at this, “Fair enough. Maybe the trap tower isn’t as bad as I’m thinking, and I just need to get better at it.” Smirking, Clara nodded in agreement, “Exactly. You just need to get good.”

Resisting the urge to cringe at the memetic joke, I just nodded back to her. 

The conversation couldn’t go on much longer though, as my next turn for the Deep Sleep came up and I was heading in. On my way in, I noticed something around the vault entrance: Flicker Flies.

There were quite a few of the little flying bugs buzzing around the vault, Mr. G not noticing them, or at least not paying them much real attention. Utilizing this, I waited for him to open the vault door, then took out one of the two little bags that me, Sam, and Jack all kept on us at all times.

Aside from the one containing the Lucid Moth powder, we also of course carried little pouches of Theta Vines. Before stepping inside the vault, I opened the bag and caught a few of the Flicker Flies inside of it.

Thankfully the flies weren’t exactly the most anxious of creatures and didn’t mind my gathering them in the pouch. If anything, once they saw me get the first two, the rest actively flew towards the bag for me to carry them along with me.

Though I hadn’t had much opportunity to do it lately with all the nightmare blob and Deep Sleep business, I’d taken to catching the Flicker Flies and seeing the memories they’d captured within them.

Having so many right there for me to gather, especially with the fact that they were right outside the vault and probably full of memories of other people’s experiences in their versions of the Deep Sleep, I couldn’t help but gather then quickly for a little amusement later on in the night.

Getting through the my realm within the Deep Sleep without damaging the bag of Flicker Flies was more than a little tricky, but I managed it thankfully. 

Granted, I had to climb while carrying the tip of the bag in my teeth, but I made it all the way to the death trap castle without a single fly getting hurt. It was like an expert video game skill run.

Unfortunately there wasn’t a chance I was going to get through the death tower, with or without the bag of Flicker Flies with me. 

I managed to get passed the circular saws, fire, the pit of endless nothing, and the crushing walls, but the ceiling of drilling spikes got me for the third time running. 

I just could not get the timing down on that one, and I genuinely couldn’t tell if the pattern was changing or staying the same each time; one of the frustrations of only getting one or two chances to enter the vault per week.

I wasn’t too bothered by the expected failure this time though, as I still had the flies to go through before I went to bed/woke up in the waking world. 

I headed back to regular nightly classes, getting through about twenty minutes of note taking on the process of building living structures with Lucid abilities before heading to my room.

I sat down on the bed, not yet laying down as doing so would almost instantly knock me out so I could wake up in the waking world. I laid my back against the wall and opened the bag just slightly so I could take out the Flicker Flies one by one rather than letting them all swarm out at once.

I held up the first Flicker Fly to see the memory it had captured within its body. It showed me another student, a guy by the name of Arthur I think. His Deep Sleep land appeared to be a sort dark cave, lit only by shining crystals. 

The geometry of the cave’s tunnels was difficult to wrap my head around, but Arthur didn’t seem interesting in keeping track of his way through the cavern, more interesting in avoiding whatever it was pursuing him through the place.

“Stupid.. mantis.. freaks..” Arthur panted when he finally came to a stop to catch his breath. I wasn’t sure how much further he made it through the tunnel, as the memory cut off shortly after Arthur’s head jerked to the side in response to a low gurgling sound echoing through the rocky caves.

The sound was upsetting, a guttural, wet, feral sounding growl. The echoing made it seem to be coming from every direction at once, or perhaps there were just quite a few different sources of the sound coming from every direction around Arthur.

Slightly unsettled by this, I let go of the Flicker Fly, letting it fly off out the window of my room. I took out the next Flicker Fly and let it display its captured memory.

It was a slightly older classmate, though I didn’t recognize him or know his name at all. He was scaling a cliff, an ice covered one with what looked like curved claws made of painted glass sticking out of the sides. 

He climbed up by gripping the claws and pulling himself up, trying to work his way up to the summit of the mountain, only to be knocked off of the cliff by what I can only describe as animated television static that screeched like a demonic bird.

He didn’t seem nearly as terrified by the sudden attack and subsequent fall as I was, simply letting out a long string of curses in the ball of black and white static as he fell, landing on the floor of the vault and punching the ground before standing up, the vision the Flicker Fly had captured fading.

Much as I knew everyone was having trouble from how everyone was talking about the Deep Sleep, it was still nice to actually see that I wasn’t the only one failing so frequently it was no longer surprising.

The third Flicker Fly seemed to have started in the middle of something that I didn’t have nearly as much context to understand what was actually happening in it. 

A girl I recognized as being called Selina was in the middle of falling, carrying a metal hook in one hand and what looked like a stick of dynamite in the other. Her words came out starting mid-sentence.

“-ow this beehive to bits!” She shouted, throwing the dynamite to the yellow, hexagonal floor below her before throwing the hook up above her. The hook sank into one of the nine mismatched legs of what looked more like a combination of a vulture and gila monster than any kind of bee. 

With a powerful pull of her arm, aided presumably by the force of the bright blue explosion from below her, Selina was throw high up into the air, slinging herself above the bird dragon as flames spread along the honeycomb.

The memory cut off before I could see where she landed, if she landed, or what she’d have to deal with afterwards. 

Frankly I wanted to know more, but I knew there wouldn’t be any subtly way to ask Selina for specifics without bringing up the Flicker Flies, which would require a vote from Sam and Jack, and I doubted either of them would be keen on me bringing up the Dreamscape wildlife to anyone else.

Slightly disappointed but unable to do anything to alleviate the feeling, I released the Flicker Fly and moved on to the next on in the bag, hoping for one that didn’t leave with quite so many questions.

No such luck, as the next one displayed a guy I didn’t recognize who’s Deep Sleep realm was one of the abnormal realms like Clara’s. He was short, bald, and thin, and appeared to be tight rope walking across a beam of light reflected off of a mirror.

He was in a massive building.. Cavern.. Let’s just call it a very wide open yet still enclosed space. It was composed entirely of glass or perhaps some kind of clear crystal, maybe even diamonds.

Whatever it was made of, it gave off a bizarre, otherworldly look from how smooth and simultaneously angular everything appeared to be. It was nice to know that I could still see things as being like that even after what all I’d seen.

In any case, he appeared to have positioned a large mirror of the stuff to reflect light across an otherwise uncrossable chasm. This had evidently resulted in the light become tangible and allowing him to walk across it.

But the issue still laid in balance it seemed, and he never made it more than a few steps before he had to stop to avoid falling from his bridge of light. He took several deep breaths to calm himself before he continued forward.

He’d just reached the end of the bridge when another obstacle, presumably one he’d not encountered before considering how off guard it seemed to catch him, made itself known.

A massive chandelier of the glass/crystal forming everything dropped down, crushing the guy. It was an odd look, like someone had superimpose an image of him being flattened and stabbed in several places over an image of him simply dropping to the floor before the scene faded and he reappeared in the vault.

The memory ended and I took out the second to last of the Flicker Flies I’d captured. Contained within it was a memory from another student I actually recognized, a guy named Morise from the grade above me.

I was made more curious when I saw this, as the higher grades didn’t discuss their Deep Sleeps nearly as much as us, and I was rather interested to see what a higher skill level vault would be like.

His realm seemed to be one underground, the walls, floor, and ceiling clearly being more natural and made of dirt rather than the tunnels I’d seen in the other student’s realm. 

This led to the unfortunate question of what had dug such massive underground tunnels, a question that Morise got the answer to seconds after it occurred to me. The tunnel shook with the sound of a high pitched squeal.

The best way I can describe it is Satan’s pet pig getting its skinned flayed with a butter knife. It was hellish, and animalistic, and upsetting on a primal level.

Morise, quite reasonably, immediately broke into a full tilt sprint down the cave. I suspected he’d been through his section of his Deep Sleep before, because he seemed to have no problem avoiding the hazards; jumping over suspended stones, avoiding the dissolving handholds in a climbing wall, ducking under pillar traps before they were even sprung on him. 

It seemed that the key to getting passed a trapped area really was just pure memorization and honed skills.

But he then seemed to reach a section he didn’t recognize, or perhaps had seen before but not made it through. It looked like quick sand, but rising up to form a wall in front of him. Morise stared at it anxiously for a few moments before hellish wail from porkins behind him spurred him onward. 

He took a deep breath and walked through the quicksand wall. 

Said wall was shortly tackled by what appeared to be a minotaur, but with no horns, long mole like claws, and a tongue that reached down to the ground and… had a hand attached to the end?

I took a reasonable guess that this was the creature who’d been releasing the wail, but whether it made it through the wall, whether it caught up to Morise, or if Morise made it to the end of the quicksand alright were not preserved in the Flicker Fly, and the memory recording ended there.

I sighed as I released it, taking out the next fly to see what it had captured. I could tell the moment the memory started that this was another abnormal Deep Sleep land, just from the layout I was looking at.

The land was being navigated by a guy older than me. He was large, with a well kept beard that was confusingly darker in color than his actual hair. 

There was no solid ground in his land it seemed, just a series of metallic bars spreading and stretching out in every direction like a rigid spiderweb. He had to carefully balance his way across the area without falling through the bars. 

There didn’t seem to be any monsters for him to outrun, so he could slowly work his way across the bars without needing to hurry. There was however a loud, sudden banging out that sounded so loud it shook the bars beneath his feet.

Evidently he hadn’t encountered this before, because he was not at all prepared for the shaking. He lost his footing and fell through the bars, just barely managing to catch himself with his legs locking around the bars. 

It looked like a rather painful position, but one he could still probably escape from. Whether or not he did was not for me to see though, as the captured memory ended and flickered out of view.

I released the fly and took out another. This one seemed to be a much more standard vault land, with all the basic elements that me and the others had discovered in the majority of them before.

The guy in it was a short one, but he didn’t look young, just literally small. He was sprinting full tilt across a black paved road, trying to outrun what appeared to be a mass of spinning, twirling plant matter; like an avalanche of wheat and dead grass.

The nature storm would have been bad enough to deal with, but that wasn’t all there was to it. The guy had to constantly jump to hurdle over small gates that jutted up out of the ground to try and knock him over.

Evidently his inner world was a hellish sporting event. Frankly I could sympathize. No idea how far he got, but I’m guessing not far because the last thing I saw was him getting tripped up by a hurdle that then sprouted another hurdle to knock him to the ground in front of the storm.

It struck me as more than a little unfair, and I made a mental note to keep track of things like that if they started to pop up in my world. 

Who knows, it was more than possible I was getting tricked up by something unfair without even knowing it if it. 

In any event, I took out the next Flicker fly, which appeared to be the second to last on in the bag, and honestly it was probably the most confusing, incomprehensible one in the entire bunch that I’d gathered.

It only lasted a few seconds. Within that few seconds a girl sitting in a coffee shop took a sip of her coffee. That coffee hissed at her, jumped out of the cup and shattered like glass on the floor.

The girl gasped, but it seemed more like a gasp of fear than surprise or shock. She stood up from her chair, and the coffee shards began to spread across the coffee shop, which at some point, without my noticing, had become a medieval dungeon complete with suits of armor lining the walls.

The girl pulled a knife off of her belt and took a combative stance, shouting a defiant battle cry of, “Bring it you iron clad crybaby!” 

And then it ended, leaving me with a few dozen questions and nothing resembling an answer. 

Who was she? Why was she in a coffee shop? Why was the coffee shop a dungeon? How did it change so suddenly without me noticing? When did she get a knife? Why was she just sitting there drinking coffee? If she’d known the coffee could shatter and send her to the dungeon, why had she tried to drink it? Who was this iron crybaby that she was calling out? 

I was all but certain that this was another abnormal Deep Sleep land, but frankly I couldn’t even be certain of that much. I shook my head to clear it of whatever I’d just seen and went to get the final fly.

Looking into the bag, I took out the last Flicker Fly that I had captured for the night. It to displayed someone I didn’t recognize, a brunette girl with long pigtails. Her world appeared to be made of fabric.

Yes, fabric.

The land was knitted in place, high towers made of woven patchwork fabric of different colors all around her. There was even a quilted sun hanging in the sky overhead, held in place by yarn, and still somehow emitting light for her to see.

Alright, she definitely had my attention.

She didn’t seem nervous or unsettled at all by the knitted world around her. Maybe she just didn’t find it threatening. Personally I thought it was slightly creepy, but objectively speaking I guessed there was nothing inherently sinister about the patchwork land around the girl, just unnerving in its form.

But the girl skipped through it pleasantly. Considering how long everyone had had to learn the ins and outs of their Deep Sleep, or at least the first parts of it, I could only assume that she knew there weren’t any enemies after her. 

Couldn’t imagine she’d be so upbeat if she was being chased by unholy slug eels or vampire bears or whatever else her world might have been inhabited by.

Guess that meant she too had an uncommon Deep Sleep realm, as they were the only kind without any enemies chasing you in them. 

I wasn’t sure if I was envious of her or not. Having no immediate threats seemed like it would make things much easier, but I guessed that there were probably other threats to compensate for it.

She looked up at the quilted towers around her, perhaps wondering what was inside or on top of them. At least that’s what my first thought was. I quickly learned from what followed that I was very, very wrong.

I’d learned by now how many Tulpas were created outside the academy building on a daily basis by the students’ imaginations, and ever since we’d started going into the Deep Sleep they’d only been getting more and more present; making Mitch’s little section of territory more and more crowded temporarily whenever they formed.

But I’d never heard of a Tulpa forming inside the school itself. 

And yet there it was. As the girl walked up a woollen hill, the signature orange ball of spored at the top, and from it stumbled a…

Okay, bare with me on this; and no that pun wasn’t on purpose. It looked like a teddy bear at human size, only slightly taller than the girl who’d evidently summoned it. Its movements were unnatural, like a man trying to walk with every limb of his body having gone numb simultaneously. 

Most confusing was the fact that the girl didn’t seem at all surprised by the bear’s presence. She’d been expecting it, and smiled when it appeared in front of her, running up and hugging the oversized teddy.

The bear, likely believing entirely that it was in fact her teddy bear and nothing more, hugged her back, and they began to transverse the quilted lands together. Whatever came next was unknown to me, as the Flicker Fly memory faded shortly after. 

I sat their, staring at nothing in particular for a few moments as the fly buzzed off and out the window. The others were absolutely going to want to know about this.


	14. Chapter 14

“In the vault?” Jack questioned incredulously. I nodded in confirmation, “I saw it in the Flicker Fly. I don’t think it was the first time it happened either. She didn’t seem surprised at all, like she’d been expecting it.”

It was the next night now, and I’d called an impromptu meetup with Jack and Sam. 

Sam had been easy to get ahold of, but we had to get out of the building and raise the wildgrass to get Jack’s attention. Once we were all out, we started talking while on our way to the shack.

“And you’re certain it wasn’t an Offshoot that’s just living inside the vault?” Sam asked. 

“First of all, even if that was a case, that would still be unnerving on a very deep level,” I said, “And second, yes I’m sure. I watched it form out of the spore cloud. Unless Offshoots just disperse themselves regularly and reform again.”

Jack shook his head, “Not possible. Offshoots don’t even know they’re Tulpas remember? There must just be a lot of Tulpa spores in the vault somehow, or maybe she had the spores on her clothes. Did she see it forming herself?”

I nodded, “I wouldn’t have been able to see it in the memory if she hadn’t.” I said, Jack nodding as he assumed his deep thought expression, “Boys, I think she’s weaponized Dreamscape wildlife.”

“What do you mean?” Sam questioned. 

“Exactly what I said,” Jack said, “I think she knows what Tulpas are, or at least how they function, and is intentionally bringing them into the vault with her to cheat in the Deep Sleep. If the teddy she’s forming is supposed to be some kind of guardian friend, then it can probably help her get through her world more easily.”

“Cheating with a tulpa?” It made sense, but was no less unbelievably all things considered. Maybe it was just a matter of being a little annoyed at us no longer being the only ones who knew about the wildlife of Dreamscape. 

It then occurred to me that if we weren’t, then…

“She’s been out of the school.” I realized, getting quizzical looks from the other two, “Only Flicker Flies actually get inside the building remember? If she’s got a Tulpa on her, then she has to have found a way out of the building to gather the spores.”

“How could she have gotten out without us knowing?” Sam wondered, glancing back up at the building in the distance, “Could she have found a way out on the other side of it? There’s no Wildgrass there…”

“I think the better question is how she managed to carry Tulpa spores on her,” Jack said, “She either had to get out of the building before classes, found a Tulpa mid-formation, got herself covered in the spores before it took form, got back inside the building without anyone noticing, and kept herself away from anyone’s imaginations until entering the vault-which frankly I refuse to believe is possible-or she’s found a way to contain Tulpa spores.”

I nodded in agreement, “You’re right, it’s probably the latter. Any ideas how?” 

Jack shook his head, “I’ve have to see it myself before I could make any good guesses. Let’s stick a pin in this for a bit and deal with it later, we’ve got enough on our plates as it is. So, either of you learned how to Lucid things up yet?”

I shook my head, “No, not really. I’m not even sure how I’d try.” Jack nodded, “Same here I’m afraid. This is some slow going.”

We both turned to Sam, who’d not answered. “Well..” He said, hesitating. Seeming to think a demonstration would do better, he held his hand out to a stone on the ground and closed his eyes.

Me and Jack’s jaws dropped as we watched the stone lift from the ground and move slowly into his hand. Sam was a Lucid now. 

“When’d you learn to do that?” I asked, as he’d not mentioned anything about it. “Just last night really, but I’ve been working on it for awhile now. I don’t think its actually possible to get all the way through the Deep Sleep without using it.”

It made sense now that he said it, to the point that I kinda felt stupid. I, like the majority of the students I guess, had been operating under the idea that the powers would come to us after we’d completed the Deep Sleep, like a reward for defeating it, a power up. 

But if it was supposed to teach us how to use it like Mr. G had said, then it didn’t make any sense if it were to work like that.

“Alright, can you make anything with it?” Jack asked, wanting to know the extent of Sam’s new ability. Sam thought for a moment, enclosing the stone between his hands and focusing once again.

He moved his hands away, and where before a stone had been floating, now a small length of brass was present, like a magic trick that stated Sam’s intentions without him needing to say them.

Unfortunately it was made clear by the bar’s near instant vanishing into nothingness between Sam’s fingers that, impressive as we both personally found this, Sam still had a little ways to go.

“Still way more than either of us could even try,” I assured him, “We’re gonna have to try way harder if we’re gonna catch up.” Jack nodded in agreement, “Agreed. Everyone, double time on your Deep Sleep, got it?” 

“Got it.” Sam and I said together, heading back into the building to wake up for the day. Sooner we woke, the sooner we could get back to sleep and get back to work.


	15. Chapter 15

Even I wasn’t following my own schedule at this point. As much as the idea of this was upsetting to me on a very deep level, I felt it was justified.

Failing one or two tests in the meantime was definitely worth it if the alternative was being consumed by the eternal blackness of a Nightmare monster.

Any time not spent working on the Deep Sleep, awake or in Dreamscape, I felt was wasted time.

Any time I wasn’t physically in the Deep Sleep trying to get through it, I was drawing up maps and marking what I knew about the place step by step, writing theories and possible techniques down prevent myself from forgetting anything on the off chance any of it was useful.

And this applied to both Dreamscape and IRL school. Any time I had was time I could spend on this. My former limited Dreamscape wildlife notes had evolved and taken over other forms of information gathering.

I started taking more naps as well. I should have known from the start that napping would let me spend more time in the Dreamscape, but it just hadn’t occurred to me at all until Sam mentioned it on our way to wake up one day. 

Being in the Dreamscape more often gave us extra opportunities to enter the vault and train our Lucid abilities. It was slow going sure, but movement was movement even if it was at the speed of a glacier.

I attempted once, and only once, to cheat on the Deep Sleep. I figured that if a girl was sneaking a Tulpa into the vault to get through the challenges, then I could do something similar to get through. 

The Deep Sleep and the powers you obtained through training in it were all based around lucidity, so I figured that some combination of Theta vine and lucid moth powder could perhaps let me cheese the system. 

I was wrong. Horribly, horribly, apocalyptically, nightmarishly wrong. 

I’m not so egotistical as to say that I’d have not used it if it had worked, I probably would have it probably would have backfired at some point down the line. 

But it never got to that point, as the plan was dead on arrival.

And good lords above, below, and in between, it wanted me to know how bad an idea it was, just out of spite. 

It took me a few days to work out through trial and error outside the vote what combination of theta vine and moth powder I could use without automatically waking myself up.

The feeling outside the vault was fine, even fun. 

The moth powder kept my mind aware of where I was, and the vine kept my mind from going too far and jolting awake. It was like having twenty twenty vision in every direction at once. 

I could count the hairs on the head of a student thirty paces behind me while reading a book and retail all the information from both without issue. 

And while I absolutely intended to use this for studying outside the vault afterwards, the sights conjured by using it within the vault… never, never again.

I hadn’t accounted for how the vault itself affected the mind, how it induced a state of hyper creativity, self awareness, and hyper vulnerability to ideas. 

I don’t know which of the three is what made this such a bad idea, or if it was just the combination of the three, but I hardly cared which was the cause around the time my world became a living nightmare.

Now, I would like to take this opportunity to restate what my Deep Sleep realm was just by itself: a sulfurous, flaming, brimstone, porcelain spider infested death trap full of smoke, hidden threats, jagged cliffs, and no mercy whatsoever. 

So when I say only after going into it while under the affects of my personal lucid moth powder and theta vine combination did it become a true nightmare, I want everyone to understand exactly what I meant.

The brimstone floor melted away, leaving me standing on blank nothing as the spiders flew towards me. Before they could get to me though, they too began to melt, becoming blobulous globs of vaguely spider shaped smoke and sludge. 

They collided with each other like the contents of a lava lamp, merging and growing into a single, horrific being who’s proportions reminded me of the Dreamscape Academy building itself; if it came to life and realized it hated its inhabitants and wanted them all dead.

I tried to run away from it, but I was wedged in place. The mix I’d taken made it impossible for me not to know that I was just in an empty vault room, so with no floor in my sight, I couldn’t move. 

At the same time, the hyper creativity combined with the focus from the theta vine in the mix only gave the beast approaching me more solidity as it approached, grabbing me and throwing me against the wall of the vault.

It was like a bad photoshop effect, the normal vault room overlaid over the image of my Deep Sleep world, mixing and swirlining with the descriptions and sights of other Deep Sleep lands I’d seen, creating an abstract picture as beautiful as it was unhelpful and frankly stomach churning as the otherworldly cloud of spidery limbs reached towards me, slashing across my chest.

I don’t know if it was pain, hyper awareness, fright, or luck that caused me to black out, but when I woke next I was back in my waking world bed, the conclusion of my night’s time in the vault unknown to me until that afternoon when I managed to get a nap in and ask Mr. G about it.

“Frankly we were going to ask you about it,” Mr. G said, “We went into the vault after you when you reached the time limit, but it was empty. You probably just got too shaken during the run through. 

“If you let your nerves getting the better of you while you’re in the vault, your mind will take advantage of the hyper awareness it puts you in and force you awake. 

“You’ll be fine, it’d take repeated jolting of this kind to cause any real damage, and even then the damage would only be stress related.”

I nodded at Mr. G’s explanation, “Alright, I understand. Sorry for this.” Mr. G rose his hands, “It’s perfectly fine. No one here expects you or anyone to do perfectly on this. It’s a lesson, just be sure you learn from it, alright?”

I nodded again, “Right, you got it.” 

And with that, I left Mr. G’s office and returned to class, wondering if I should have mentioned the scar I’d found on my chest where the shadowy spider beast had struck me the night prior. I guess being hyper aware was just as much a weakness as it was a weapon.

On the bright side, I was never going to be afraid of my normal Deep Sleep land again. 

Any time I got even slightly nervous, I could think to myself, ‘Hey, could be worse, at least you aren’t being ripped apart by a shadowy spider cthulhu while locked in place and surrounded by a nightmarish mix of different things you’d witnessed’. 

Bit of a long winded mantra I admit but hey whatever gets the point across.

Jack and Sam were in no way happy about this, especially when they saw the mark that was left on me. I received an immediate smack across the head from Jack for this. One for using the vine/dust mix in the first place, then a second for not telling them. 

It didn’t actually hurt, just annoying really. The look on Sam’s face as I explained what happened, that one was what hurt.

“Okay, okay, it was a stupid idea and I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry, I was just getting frustrated.” I said. 

“And we’re not?” Sam questioned, “There’s some kind of elder demon trying to break through the veil and we’re the only ones who know about it. This would be so much easier if we could just ask the teachers for help.”

Jack immediately put a stop to this, “No, not an option. Even if there was any of them who’d actually believe us enough to physically leave the building, and I think we all know there isn’t, what would they do to us after fixing the gate? Do you think we’ll get any kind of reward for letting them know? 

“They’ll make it impossible for us to come back out ever again. They won’t let anyone know about the dreamscape creatures, can’t let anyone know that they’ve been wrong this entire time. 

“You might think it’s a small price to pay, but I don’t think it is if we’re able to handle it ourselves.”

Neither of us had thought of it this way, and I think Sam still wasn’t, but we at least understood Jack’s logic. Until things proved to really be too much for us, we needed to take care of it ourselves.


End file.
